I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. At least, we tell ourselves it’s for ice cream, as we scream our lungs out at the unknowing, uncaring, impassive sky, voices filled with existencial dread, desperately and ultimately fruitlessly seeking something, anything, out there that might dist...

The Endless Ones slumber beneath the city Unthinkably huge, eternally old and horrifying beyond all imagination, simply to view them is to go mad from revelations no mortal man was ever meant to know. Surely upon waking they could destroy us, one and all, obliterating our city and all who dwell with...

I’ll fly as close to the sun as I fucking please. My wings are made of sturdier stuff than those of Icarus, and I am a man of vision, scope and ambition. I shan’t be scared off by tales of lesser men and their failings. For I am not those lesser men. I’ll fly to the very sun, pluck it from its perch...

“Let me make myself clear…” he told me, and then vanished. Which, to be completely honest, I found more than a little bit smug. I mean, okay, we get it, you have powers beyond those of mortal man, powers that include among others mastery over your body at the molecular level, to the point that you c...

It’s been said that, while a friend will help you move, your best friend will help you move a body. And he IS my best friend, I’ve known him years and trust him more than anyone else on earth, so here I am, helping dig. And I’m doing it with a smile on my face. That’s what friendship is, after all, ...

I wake with the worst hangover of my life, and discover I’m wearing a Starbucks uniform. I don’t remember much about last night, an evening, a bar, a group of friendly strangers, rounds of Jager shots and, past that, nothing at all until this moment… I find the note by my bed and know what it will s...

What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Now, it’s 2015, we want to be inclusive, so let me add: Crushing female/non-binary enemies and hearing male/non-binary lamentations is also best in life, in whatever combination is a...

During the war, I was part of an elite group, tasked with sabotaging the supply lines of the enemy. We did good work, I think, we aided the effort in a way that was invaluable, but we never quite got along personally. We were dicks to one another, basically. I was a dick to everyone else, basically....

One piece at a time, focusing on the one, until a unified whole emerges. THIS is how to build a thing, whether a structure, work of art, or a life, one piece upon another, focusing on the piece at hand, trying not to worry what the next might bring. Trust each piece. Trust yourself. Your structure, ...

Oh, you misunderstand. He’s not dead. I apologize, English isn’t my first language. I flatter myself to think I speak it well, but I’ll occasionally misuse the specific idiom, not understanding what phrases are taken to mean other, unrelated phrases in the common tongue. I hope it didn’t cause any s...

Baby, you’re the bomb. Uncontrollable, easy to set off and wildly destructive, caring little for the people caught up in your wake as you tear through everything around you. I hope whoever was responsible for creating you spent the rest of their life repenting, like Nobel or Oppenheimer, because unl...

I try to be a good host. Whether I’m having people over for a night of b-movies and beer or an alien parasite has burrowed its way into my brain in order to control me like a puppet, I do whatever I can to make my guests comfortable. That’s just hospitality. Some find this old-fashioned, but that’s ...

He approached life with a critical eye, living every day with solemnity. Though he was in a jungle, of a sort, he swore to himself never to become an animal, to instead hold himself with perfect dignity in his every moment, to approach each new problem with a cool head, a rational mind and a calm, r...

If you’re happy and you know it, weep some tears. If you’re happy and you know it, shriek with fear. If you’re happy and you know it, and you really want to show it, if you’re happy and you know it, it ultimately doesn’t matter, nobody will hear your screams, will ever find you down here, not ever. ...

When Johnny Depp was kidnapped by actual Somali pirates, we all agreed it was going to be amazing. News networks went berserk, comedians got ready and we were primed to follow this amazing, if socially irrelevant, news story wherever it might take us. It was, after all, the sort of amazing TV that d...

Everyone talks about family values, but what’s the true value of a family? I mean, father, mother, two or three kids, say two for the sake of argument, that’s four transplantable hearts total, eight lungs, four livers, endless yards of usable intestine, to say nothing of the kidneys, the bone marrow...

I’m proud of the community we’ve created. We built replicants, from scratch, then programmed them to believe they were actual people, before dropping them into a perfect recreation of an early twenty-first century town. In this recreation, they work, strive and live, believing themselves to be real ...